Important terms for linguistics (phonology, semantics, etc.)

PHONOLOGY

Articulatory phonetics - vowels

In contrast to consonants, where voice, manner and place of articulation serve as descriptive categories, vowels are differentiated by their position of the tongue and the lips. These categories are indicative of the different ways in which the two sounds are produced - while consonants are produced with the help of many organs, vowels depend only on the position of the tongue and the lips. The positioning the tongue and the lips allow for a great amount of variation, enabling us to voice many more vowels than the familiar five vowels a, e, i, o, u. English has more than a dozen different vowels. Also, in English we find several diphtongs.

Vowels can be produced by raising the tongue high, keeping it in the middle, or low in the mouth; also, the tongue can be moved to the front, center or back. The lips can be rounded or nonrounded. If you try to articulate while moving your lips and your tongue around, you will notice how manifold the resulting vowel-like sounds are. A general chart of the vowels of English looks as follows:

This chart is a rough sketch of the mouth. It is similar to a coordinate system, with the positions high, middle, and low representing one axis, and the positions front, central, and back the other axis. The only position not used in English for the pronunciation of vowels is the high central point.

Place of articulation

Consonants are distinguished also according to the location of their production, that is, after the various organs of the vocal tract.

- Labials are consonants that are articulated by use of the lips. Some of these are created by bringing the lips together, like [m]. These are called bilabials. Other consonants are brought about by bringing the bottom lip to the upper teeth. These are called labiodentals, e.g., [f].
- Alveolars. These are articulated by raising the tip of the tongue to the alveolar ridge, like [d].
- Velars. If you raise the back of your tongue to the soft velum, velars are produced. An example is [g].
- Interdentals are the sounds at the beginning of "thin" and "then", in IPA: [q] and [ð]. In order to articulate these, you have to press the tongue between the teeth. Again you can se that the difference is voicing.
- Palatals (or Alveopalatals) as in the middle of the word "measure" are produced by the contact of the front part of the tongue with the hard palate just behind the alveolar ridge.

With the help of this detailed information we can now refer to every consonant by its location and manner of articulation; [f], for example, is a voiceless, labiodental fricative.

Phonemes and allophones

By calling a sound distinctive, we refer to its capability of changing the meaning of a word. Naturally, single sounds cannot carry any meaning. "B" or "P", for example, are meaningless utterances. But when several distinct sounds are assembled to a word, each of them suddenly contribute to a meaning. And by exchanging individual distinct sounds, we may change this meaning. We call these sounds phonemes, the smallest distinctive elements of a language. They are easy to discern.

Compare two words which differ only by one sound, e.g., "pin" and "bin". By replacing the beginning consonants, the meaning of the word changes. We call such pairs minimal pairs. The test we just performed to locate the phonemes is called Commutation Test. The phonemes thereby discerned are then put within dashes, such as /p/, /b/, for phonological transcription. These are, of course, ideal units of the sound system of a language. They should not be confused with the sounds of actual utterances examined by phonetics. Phonetics tries to differentiate among the sounds with the highest possible degree of accuracy. It does so without regard for the influence a sound may have on the meaning of an utterance. These phonetic units are put in brackets, as you can see in the chapter on phonetics.

Not all sounds of a language are necessarily distinctive sounds. Compare the English and American pronunciations of "dance": [da:ns] versus dæns]. Although there are different sounds in the pair, the meaning does not change. Thus, [a:] and [æ] are not phonemes in this case. We call this phenomenon free variation. The two sounds can be referred to as allophones. These sounds are merely variations in pronunciation of the same phoneme and do not change the meaning of the word. Free variation can be found in various dialects of the same language. In this case, the different pronunciations of words throughout a country do not change the meaning of those words.

Another example of sounds which are not phonemes are those which occur in complementary distribution. This means that where one sound of the pair occurs, the other does not. An example for complementary distribution are the aspirated and unaspirated allophones of /p/. The initial consonant as in "pill" is aspirated. The consonant after /s/ in "sprint" is unaspirated. The respective transcriptions would be [phil] and [sprint], where [h] indicates aspiration.

Aspirated [ph], as you can see in this example, occurs only at the beginning of words. [ph] and [p] are only allophones of the same phoneme /p/.

Distinctive features

From our studies of phonetics, we know how to describe the features of sounds. The same techniques apply for the description of phonemes. In the pair "fault" and "vault", for example, the difference lies in the voicing of the first phonemes: /f/ versus /v/, the first representing a voiced consonant [+voiced], the second an unvoiced consonant [-voiced]. Voicing is of great importance in the English sound system. Therefore we call it a distinctive feature. Other distinctive features are [±nasal] (for consonants only) or [±consonantal], etc.

Every feature has two values, the positve value '+' contrasting the negative value '-'.

SEMANTICS

Hyponymy

Consider again the example of hammer, tongs, screwdriver, cutter, saw. All of these belong to the lexical field "tools". In this case, "tool" is a semantically higher term, in that it stands for a group of items. All of the terms (hammer,...) are hyponyms of the broader term. "Hypo" is Greek for "below". Thus all tools are hyponyms of "tool". The term "tool" is, consequently, the hypernym for all tools ("hyper" = Greek "above").

Synonymy

Two words are synonymous if they "mean the same thing." We all know words which serve the same purpose. An example from German is "Geldbörse - Portemonnaie - Geldbeutel." An English example is "film - movie - motion picture." True synonyms are hard to find in a language. Most synonyms originate from local differences. For example, in Austria people refer to a street as "Gasse", whereas for the rest of the German-speaking community the same object is referred to as "Straße."

Antonymy

Apart from equality in meaning, as with synonyms, there is also the opposite. Opposition in meaning is known as antonymy. Large-small, wide-narrow, white-black, fat-slim are some examples for antonyms. All classes of words can have antonyms. Verbs: go-stand Nouns: male-female adjectives: good-bad

Homonymy.

Two lexemes that look or sound the same may mean something different. Hence, there are two types of homonymy, according to visual or acoustic equality.

- Homophony. These lexemes sound the same, such as "whether-weather" and "meet- meat".
- Homography. These lexemes look the same, as "read", meaning as well /ri:d/ as /red/ in the past tense.
- There are even homophones which are at the same time homographs, as "ear-ear." This pair designates as well the auditive organ ("Ohr") as the fruit of corn ("Ähre").

Polysemy

We say that a word is polysemic when it looks the same and has more than one meaning. This term, although it is closely related to, and has overlappings with, homography, is used to exclusively refer to words of a common etymology. The different meanings here usually constitute a specific stage in the etymology of the word, and/or the altering meaning is brought about by a metaphor (see next section). Example: ride (to ride by car or to ride a horse), or German "Stufe" (a step of a staircase or a level in school).

Metaphor

The issue of metaphors is central to the debate over 'meaning'. Traditionally metaphors have been regarded as a type of extension of, or analogy to, the literal sense of linguistic signs. Most commonly they are extensions of visual, physical objects or experiences onto the abstract or emotional domains of thinking. For example, the metaphorical use of the word 'branch', as in the sense of 'branches of sciences', is derived from a meaning originally denoting a physical object. The debate carried out over 'metaphors' is thus largely a philosophical one that questions our traditional dialectic between the body and the soul. In trying to overcome this dialectic, or in trying to understand it, some argue that everything is a metaphor, while others question exactly how it is that the meaning of a sign can be extended with a metaphor. We can also say that people use and also create new metaphors much more often than one might think. Most of the metaphors we use are so conventionalized that we are not aware of using them as metaphors. For example, if you see the point, you should understand that this is a metaphor, since one cannot "see" an utterance. As we see, there is some "literal" meaning in the linguistic signs. However, signs may be used to create new meaning. Metaphors work on the principle that something in the original meaning is similar to the new one.

Denotation and Connotation

The phrases 'IRA terrorists' and 'IRA freedom fighters' denote the same people, but they connote something quite different.